


Transformation

by KateShepherd



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Everyone is dead but Josh, but he's still turning into a wendigo, no happy ending, well i wrote one but i didn't like it was much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 15:09:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8061250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KateShepherd/pseuds/KateShepherd
Summary: Maybe they’ll be gone when I wake up, he hopes as he diffs off to sleep.They’re still there when he wakes.Aka Sole Surviver Josh





	

Day 1

The voices stopped, so had what Josh suspected to be the hallucinations. He had expected his friends to leave with them, but they didn’t. All of them were hanging on hooks, their heads scattered across the ground.

 _Please go away,_ his thoughts race, _please don’t really be dead._

He pokes Chris’s face one more time. Just to make sure it’s real. Sure enough, it is just as solid as it had been weeks ago.

Josh wants to start crying again, but he’s too dehydrated to work up any tears. He rises to his feet, and walks deeper into the mines, trying to get as far from the bodies as he possibly can. There is a small corner in the mine that would work nicely as a bed, so he takes a seat.

He doesn’t understand where all this new energy has come from. Only just two days earlier (or what he suspects is two days) it had taken all of his energy to move by the water, and even then he had to crawl. Now he is walking as if he hasn’t been staring for three weeks.

He isn’t exactly sure how only a bite of the stranger’s head can give him so much energy, but he is just thankful that he doesn’t have to look at the rotting corpses of his friends.

 _Maybe they’ll be gone when I wake up,_ he hopes as he diffs off to sleep.

They’re still there when he wakes.

 

Day 5

His fingernails have fallen out. It wasn’t painful. It is just simply something that happened. Josh suspected it is just his body’s way of telling him he is about to die.

Josh isn’t afraid to die, not anymore at least.

The voices may have been gone, but that doesn’t stop his own thoughts from turning on him. Every day, when he wakes up to the smell of rotting corpses, he knows that it’s his fault. That all of it is his fault.

Just like with Hannah and Beth, he had failed his friends. No, he did much worse than fail them. He killed them. If it wasn’t for his stupid prank they wouldn’t have been up on this horrible mountain. They wouldn’t have died.

He hopes that Sam and Mike made it out. He hopes that both of them are alive and happy. That even maybe they could forgive him for killing everyone. Hell, he even hopes that they send a search party to find him.

Not to save him, but so they could find everyone else’s bodies.

 _And I hope they find me dead next to them,_ he thought, _that they know how sorry I am all of this happened._

He loses his train of thought when he realizes something. He doesn’t feel the cold anymore.

 

Day 12

He finally gives into his hunger.

The stranger’s body is just hung up in chains, just begging to be taken down and eaten. He tries to ignore it, but his hunger is too powerful.

What had once been the most revolting taste in the world seems to have magically change. It is sweet and savory, and all Josh can focus on is how it is the most delicious meal he’s ever had.

He eats an entire arm before he stops.

Disgusted by his own actions, he pulls himself away. Every part of him is screaming so go and finish the ~~meal~~ _man!_ Josh tries to fight it, but he’s no better at ignoring the voices than he is ignoring this animalistic instinct.

His teeth fall out in the man’s arm. He touches his gums, only to find something sharper growing in their place.

 

Day 16

He catches his own reflection in the still water. For a second he jumps, thinking the same monster that had dragged him away – _Hannah_ , he reminds himself – has come back for him. Then, he slowly moves back over to the water, his eyes growing wide at what he sees.

Half of his mouth seems to have extended to his cheek. He has fangs where his teeth were, and his eyes look lighter than before. He thinks they’re glossy, but it’s hard to tell in the darkness of the mines and in the limited reflection the water give him. One of his eyelids are gone was well. He hadn’t even noticed that fact he wasn’t blinking anymore.

 _That’s me,_ he tells himself, _that’s me._

His fangs make him think of Halloween. Years and years ago, when he was still a child, and before he got sick. He and Chris, he remembers, went as vampires that year. They both are wearing those plastic fangs and hissing at his sisters.

Josh manages to find some fake blood in his dad’s office, and he throws the it in his best friend’s face. Chris pretends to be upset, and Josh falls right for it. The second Chris is next to him, he tackles him.

He wipes the blood off of his face and rubs it right onto Josh’s. Pretty soon both of their outfits are stained red, but Josh doesn’t care. He wears a smile for the rest of the day that Halloween.

He begins to collect his friends’ heads. Before he was terrified to touch them, but not anymore. He cannot bare the sight of them rolling around on the ground any more.

Each head he places by the rock he sleeps on. The stranger’s body and head remands in the same place.

Food doesn’t belong next to his bed, only his friends.

Their bodies he leaves hanging, mostly because he can’t figure out what to do with them.

 _Another day,_ his mind thinks.

That night he finishes the rest of the stranger’s body, and all that’s left is his head, which was already half eaten.

A sudden annoyance fills him when he realizes that he will have to go hunting.

 

Day 18

For a moment, he forgets her name. He thought it was Jessica, but no, it’s not that.

 _Ashley,_ a voice that sounds suspiciously like his own answers.

He thinks of her while he sits in the pool of water. He had finally decided it is time to wash the dried blood from him. There is a cut on his shoulder. It’s already closed, but he thinks of Ashley when he sees it.

Then he sees images in his mind.

They’re of him and the reddish, brown haired head – _ASHLEY,_ his mind screams. Josh remembers going to the pool together. Ashley sits on his shoulders and tries to push over another dark haired girl who also is sitting on a man’s shoulders.

Josh remembers tripping the man – _Mike –_ and both him and the dark haired woman go down. Ashley cheers on his shoulders, and she smiles. It’s strange to remember her smiling when her head is now forever frozen in a state of shock.

“I bet I know who you’d rather have between you’re thighs,” He jokes. Ashley’s face grows bright red and she splashes water in his face. Some of it goes up his nose, but he’s to busy laughing to care.

He tries to hold on to the memory, but it fades from his mind.

He stays in the pool for another hour, trying to will the memory to come back, but it never does.

 

Day 19

He returns from his first hunt proud and satisfied. Then he notices their bodies, and his good mood instantly fades.

They look as though they are about to fall from the hooks. Their bodies must have grown softer from their time decaying.

It upsets him to see his friends in such a way, and he leaves the mine for a short time.

When he returns, he’s carrying snow in his claw-like hands. He takes down every body that is hanging, and buries them in the snow. It takes hours to bring down enough snow to cover even one body, but he doesn’t stop. Not until everyone is safe.

Josh freezes when he sees one of the bodies. His head still sits next to his bed, but he recognizes the jacket.

 _Mike_ , he thinks, _no wait… Matt!_

Much like the day before, images flash in his mind. They’re memories, he knows that, but he keeps forgetting that’s what they’re called.

He sees Matt running through a field. There are other people, but they’re all faceless to Josh, all he recognizes is Matt.

“Score me a touchdown,” Josh hears his own voice say.

“I’m a linebackers, I don’t score the points,” Matt says with a small smile on his lips.

“But it’s my birthday,” Josh playfully wines.

He remembers it. By some miracle someone had dropped the ball. Matt was right next to it and managed to get a hold of it.

He ran and ran and a few times it seems as though one of the faceless men would catch him, but Matt kept running. He reaches the end, and every one of the faceless people sitting next to him cheers.

No, they aren’t entirely faceless, he recognizes a few sitting next to him as his friends, and even two faces that belong too those who’s heads aren’t next to his bed.

Josh remembers cheering the loudest, a wide smile on his face. Now his mouth is much wider, but there is no longer a smile.

A pain over takes him, and he covers Matt’s body faster then he does the others, hoping that it would make the pain go away if he doesn’t look at him.

It does.

 

Day 24

His eyesight is all but gone by now. He can only see anything that moves, but it barely bothers him. He still knows all of his friends by scent, even if he can’t remember their names all the time.

Even with his eyesight being horrible, he can still see light, and so he sees the stars on a clear night and thinks of the blonde girl. Not the one that sometimes appears in his memories, the other one, the one who’s hair looks like a nest and who’s jaw is gone.

Josh remembers laughing with her under the stars. They lie on the grass and speak to each other as they drink something. He thinks that she looks much prettier with her jaw still attached.

They’re both smiling and seem so happy. He tries to focus on the words, but his memory fades in and out.

“…glad… snuck off… dying…milkshake,” the blonde says.

“…yeah…best,” Josh replies as he takes another sip. He thinks he makes a joke, cause their both laughing again.

It’s dark, not as dark as what he is now used to, but Josh remembers thinking of that night as dark. The stars were so bright in his mind though. He remembers pointing out stars to her.

Her hair sweeps in her face, and Josh moves behind her, grabbing a chunk of it.

“How…know…braid?” She asks, a look of shock and joy on her face.

“Hannah…learn…Beth wouldn’t.” He answers as he folds her hair. Josh is a little shocked as he remembers knotting her hair into what looks like a nest of some kind. The girl seems happy by it though.

 _Not a nest,_ he had to tell himself, _it’s a braid._

He hears her humming as he plays with her hair. She has a nice voice. It’s the softest thing Josh can even remember hearing anymore. When he’s done, the two go back to staring at the stars and laughing together.

When the memory fades from him entirely, he feels his hand rub against his skull. Most of his hair is gone. It had fallen out in chunks, but Josh forgot that he had hair up until the memory.

He decides that when he returns from his hunt he will try to braid her hair again, in an attempt to keep the memory from fading like the others.

That thought is forgotten when he notices a trail. He knows it leads somewhere important, but he’s too afraid to follow it.

 

Day 25

His hunger gets the better of him, and on this hunt, he follows a deer up the trail. He’s just about to punch on it when he notices it.

It feels familiar, but he can’t place how. The place is all but destroyed, and he can still smell a little ash in the air.

 _A fire,_ he realizes. The animal side of him wants to leave and return to chasing the deer, but the human part of Josh makes him stay. He needs to answers, but he’s not sure which questions they’d answer.

He enters the place. The walls are gone and so is half the floor. He sees another room below the place. He’s about to go explore it, when he catches the faintest smell of something.

He moves over to a spot in what remands of the wood. There’s a stain on it, and for whatever reason the area around it is not charred like the rest of the room.

 _Something was over it,_ he realizes. Them he takes another sniff of the stain, and know it wasn’t something, rather someone.

It smells like what he could only describe as home. It’s the blood of a person he knew he loved, another one of his friends.

An image appears in his mind of a woman. She’s short and blonde (but a darker blonde then the jawless girl, its something closer to the blonde of Chris’s hair) and most of all brave.

When she laughs, it’s with her whole body, and when she smiles her face lights up the whole room.

He remembers her sitting by his bed. Her eyes are red and puffy. She talking, but Josh can’t even remember the words anymore, he just focuses all of his energy on trying to remember every detail of her face.

Then she leans over and kissed his cheek. Josh raises his hand to where she kissed him, but feels only his teeth.

He spends the rest of the night lying by the stain of where she died. His stomached growls and his body screams for him to eat, but he can’t bring himself to move.

He doesn’t understand why he wants to stay by her scent for the whole night, but he does. Just before he leaves he wishes her body were still there so he could take her back to the mines. Then they’d all be together again, and he wouldn’t have to worry if he was ever going to smell her scent again.

Her name is at the tip of his tongue, but when he tries to say the word, it comes out as only a growl.

He pulls himself away only when dawn comes.

 

Day 26

He finds a gun in the bellow. He knows it’s not called the bellow, but it’s the only name he can remember for the place under the house.

He was looking for anything that smelt like the woman, but the only scent he finds is a few stains of blood on the gun.

He knows not to fear the gun. Only shotguns did anything against him anymore. There is something about this gun, though, something he can’t remember.

Then it hits him, a quick flash of a man holding the same gun in his face. He’s tall and has dark hair and looks enraged.

Josh doesn’t remember what happened to him, but he knows he’s dead as well. His body taken by the same people that took the body of the blonde.

Josh wasn’t sure why, but the every memory of him made Josh growl.

He freezes, confused to why the man causes such a reaction out of him.

The man’s name eludes him, but he remembers caring for him once. He remembers wishing for his safety. He also remembers wanting him to die and wanting him to pay.

It was all so confusing to have such conflicting feeling for someone. The rest of his friends only ever brought good memories to him, but not the dark haired man.

 _Why did I hate him,_ he wonders.

A part of him, the human side – that seems to have gotten so much quieter in the past few days – tell him that he loved him. It tells him that he only hated him so much because of how much he cared for him.

His other side, the stronger side, tells him to throw way the gun and look for more food.

He decides to spend the rest of the night hunting, but brings the gun back down into the mines by the end of the night.

 

Day 27

Josh finds something in the snow. They’re cracked and missing a piece of glass, but he vaguely recognizes them.

He takes them down into the mines and places them on Chris’s face. He finds his face looking more familiar with them on.

For a second, Josh is proud that he could even remember Chris’s name, then he wonders his name is the only one he can remember anymore.

He remembers loving him, not like the way he loves the others, more like the way he loved the other blonde, the one who’s body is missing.

He can remember putting the glasses on his face a million times before and he remembers his smile.

For a second, Josh can feel the warmth of his hand on his shoulder, but screeches when he realizes it is only a memory.

 

Day 28

He should be sleeping. It’s still morning after all, but his mind won’t let him rest. He catches a glance at one of the heads, and now he’s simply trying to remember something, anything about the head and the person it once belonged to.

He can’t remember her name, that’s long gone. But he focuses on remembering her eyes. She doesn’t have any anymore. The other one (what was her name?) took then from her. Still, he wants to remember them, just to prove that he can still remember things other then quick flashes anymore.

He sees her finally. She is with him in an all white room. He’s on some sort of bed, with a machine making noises to the beat of his heart – back when his heart actually needed to beat.

She looks angry, and Josh seems to remember her looking that way a lot. The woman, she’s barking something at him, and Josh tries to hold onto the words, but it’s impossible.

He doesn’t even think he was listening the first time anyways.

Then out of nowhere, she starts to cry. He is just as shocked as he was the first time it happened, and then she says something in a softer tone.

“Promise.. won’t try.. again.” He barely makes out.

He knows he promised, but his exact words seem to be lost to him. He can’t even remember the sound of his own voice anymore. Sometimes, he even forgets his own name.

Her eyes are clear to him now.

They are brown, but not a dark brown. They were light, and at this moment soft from tears. He had expected her eyes to be like the others, but seeing them now, he wonders how he could forget that her eyes were different.

She hugs him quickly and leaves. As she leaves the room, the memory leaves his mind. He tries to hold onto the color of her eyes and their unique shape, and for a moment he does. It takes all of his energy, but he remembers them.

Then he hears a noise, and his focus is instantly gone. So is the memory entirely, and even again does he ever wonder what her eyes once looked like.

 

Day 31

He finds another head in the mines.

Most of his days, he stays by the water and in his lair, enjoying the company of his friends and resting. When he needs to leave the mines to hunt, he crawls out of an opening not to far from him. He’s never taken the time to explore the mines because there’s no food in them.

He does one day, and the head he finds hurts him more than any fire ever could. He didn’t even know he could feel such a powerful pain ever again.

Her face is so much more familiar than the others. What he feels for the head is different for that he feels for his friends, it’s stronger. Maybe even stronger then his love for the two blondes.

Her name is lost to him, and he grows enraged when he realizes that. He throws a fit, smashing what little mining equipment and wooden structures were left.

He must have destroyed half of the mine before he carries the girl’s head back to his lair.

Even grotesque and decaying, Josh thought she was still beautiful. Remembering moments with her was much easier than it was with the others. They were clearer than they had been in a long time as well.

He sees her when she is barely a child. She looks so tiny but even then she seems bigger than him. She was the youngest of the three, but he remembers her as the strongest of them all.

She carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, especially when Josh gets sick.

Talking with her feels like talking to the sun, fiery and yet warm at the same time.

She swears she can do everything Josh can, and always manages to get herself in and out of sticky situations with a flip of a dime.

She looks out for him, and she watches their sister even closer.

He still remembers when she cut her hair. Their parents said no, and so she goes, not a few minutes later, into the bathroom, and comes out with her hair cut to her shoulders and a pair of uneven bangs.

Josh laughs. Their parents don’t.

They take her to a stylist the next day, and she’s wears her hair like that ever since.

Even now, even in death, she still wears the same hairstyle.

He spends the rest of the night, and all of the day simply watching her. His animal side tells him to move, but he can’t. It’s the same fixation that caused him to sit by the bloodstain all night, only much, much stronger.

He’s afraid to look away, even for a second. If he does, he believes he will never see her again.

His entire body aches with hunger, but some strange pain in his heart is so powerful that he doesn’t even notice until the next night.

 _“But you’re with us now,”_ a distance voice says, _“family”_

He isn’t sure if he has one anymore.

 

Day 34

The blood on the gun has lost its scent.

He’s angry again, angry that he’ll never find the scent again.

He throws the gun far away in the woods soon after. He forgets about it entirely when he returns to his lair.

A part of him can’t shake the feeling that he lost another friend.

 

Day 38

He finds a hat in the mines. He thinks it’s a hat at least.

He tries to find a scent on it, but too much time has passed, and he leaves it on the ground without another though.

Part of him wishes to remember why it seems so important to him, but he can’t.

 

Day 41

Josh visits the bloodstain again. Much like everything else, the wood no longer carries the scent of the woman he loved.

He cried out, but nothing but ~~animals~~ food is there to hear.

The rest of the night he lays by the stain, trying to get the faintest scent of her again.

 _Sammy,_ he remembers.

It is the last time he ever thinks her name.

 

Day 64

Chris is the only name he remembers anymore. He’s not even sure of his own name. Sounds of other names sometimes flash in his head, but they’re only ever sounds, not full words.

His human side tries to shout the answer, just as it had long before, but now it’s all but silence.

He can’t even remember which head the name belongs to. Their memories, their scent, it’s all starting to blur together for him. He doesn’t even remember that he loved them at times.

For a second he is heartbroken, then he doesn’t care.

 

Day 70

Three of their bodies are gone. He pulls them out of the snow and eats them. It is only after he finishes the third does he realize what he has done.

He doesn’t care the finishes the rest.

 

Day 104

He’s tired of having the heads by his bed. Their scent only ever makes him hungry anymore, but the tiniest sliver he has of his weak side forces himself not to eat them. It’s so frustrating that he decides it’s time to get rid of them.

That night, he carries the decaying heads (all but the girl who’s name he wished to remember. _Maybe it’s Chris_ , he thinks, but he feels like that wrong) from the mines and to the place he once found familiar.

He places all of their heads by the still bloodstained floor, and then returns to the mines to bring their bones as well.

They are all in piles together. What were once his friends are now simply bones and heads, and he doesn’t care. He expects his weak side to come out again, but he doesn’t. He’s other side is too strong.

He doesn’t look back as he leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not have also written a happy ending for this, but I liked the sad ending better. I honestly thought it was a lot stronger. And now I've gone a made myself sad. Sorry, guys.
> 
> Follow my Tumblr: untildawnprefernces.tumblr.com


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